Foregone Conclusion
by PragmaticHominid
Summary: Irene's mutant ability is precognition, which allows her to safely negotiate all hazards, excepting those which are preordained by fate. Mystique understands herself to be one of these dangerous exceptions. Mystique/Destiny. Part of the DEVILverse.


**Foregone Conclusion**

The one and only night that Mystique shared a bed with Irene Adler was spent in nearly complete darkness.

"I can't see you the way you see me," said Irene, who was always philosophical about her blindness, along with a great number of other things, when Mystique asked her why she wanted the bedroom lights off. Irene was poised on the edge of the bed, her legs folded back beneath her. She had taken off her dark glasses, and now Mystique was looking into her eyes for the first time; they didn't look back at her, of course, but they were a lovely shade of green.

"And you can't see me the way I see you," Irene went on. Mystique knew that Irene was speaking not of literal seeing, but of her Mutant ability, which was precognition and which allowed her to safely negotiate all hazards excepting, she said, those which were preordained by fate. Mystique understood herself to be one of these exceptions.

"But," Irene continued, "we can touch and feel and hear and taste and _know_ each other on similar terms. It's a matter of commonality of experience. All experience – all sensation and emotion and knowledge – is subjective, and this is doubly true for Mutants, as so many of us are in possession of talents or physical features which are completely and unprecedentedly unique; Just as it would be entirely impossible for me to know what it's like to wear another person's form, you will never really know how it feels to experience precognition. Nonetheless, this should not be taken to mean that we should ever cease in striving to find ways to make the most sincere connections as are possible."

"For a poet, you have an odd tendency of over-intellectualize everything," Mystique told her. "What if I want the lights on?"

"You'll turn them off," Irene said. It wasn't a hope or a request or a command or anything of that nature; it was a simple statement of a fact so obvious that there was no need for debate, delivered with the same tone that one might have used to say, 'two follows three, and that's true every single time.' "That's already been decided."

Mystique debated briefly proving her wrong by refusing to turn the lights off. But there was something strangely alluring about Irene's little speech – maybe not so much the words themselves as the promises that the tone she used to deliver them made – and she wanted very badly to begin to seek out this 'commonality of experience.'

So she turned off the lights, just as Irene had said she would. Mystique might have very easily adopted a set of eyes that could cut through the darkness, but that would have felt too dishonest, and so she did not. Irene spoke of sincerity, but Mystique knew (and supposed that Irene did as well) that there was already little enough of that in play here.

Mystique had come here simply because there was no other safe place left to go. Had she been by herself the danger that she was in – a danger which was not likely to fade away soon, if ever at all – might have been tolerable, even welcomed. But she had not come to Irene's home alone, though she would leave that way; Anna Marie slept in the guest room down the hall, curled up around a brand new teddy bear in a brand new crib.

When they had approached her two years earlier, Irene had refused to joined the Brotherhood – she had said that there was no point trying to fight, that it had all been determined already and that things would not end well – and that was why, Mystique was almost positive, Irene had not been compromised. She could leave the girl here for the time being without having to fear for her safety.

The point was to avoid losing anymore of the children. Anything else that happened during this visit was nothing more than a brief and pleasant distraction from the war.

But now Mystique slipped through the darkness, her body an inky blue line cutting through the black, and slid onto the bed beside Irene.

"What else is going to happen?" she breathed into the cup of Irene's ear. She wore a thin gold chain around her neck, Mystique knew because she had seen it around her neck in the light, and now she reached out to remove it, fingertips fluttering against the back of Irene's neck as she undid the clasp by feel.

"You're going to make me scream," Irene said, shivering with pleasure at the touch of Mystique's fingers on her skin. "And you are going to make me beg."

"Am I?" Mystique said, leaning over to deposit the gold chain on Irene's night table. "That's an interesting prospect." She had learned, certainly, that she had the capacity to make others do such things, but not in the context which Irene meant.

She took her time in undressing Irene. The other woman was eager in a way that was almost selfish, and that was a novelty for Mystique – Azazel had rarely been impatient; they had made love as though the both of them would live forever – and Mystique found this to be at once deeply exciting and a reason to go more slowly. She loved this part, the peeling away of all the synthetic layers of cloth that others hid behind to find the real person underneath, and she lingered over the task now.

There had been, God only knew, enough boys – quite possibly too many – back when she had been too young and stupid to realize that she deserved so much better. And there had been Azazel, who was in Mystique's estimation, the only real man she had ever fucked. But she had never touched another woman's body as she was touching Irene now, nor had she ever before been touched in quite this way.

Irene's hands were small and deft, the palms smooth and uncalloused, and they danced over Mystique's skin, mapping out the pattern of her scales as they might have read a page written in braille. Where Azazel's rough hands had always moved with a careful and self-conscious gentleness out of fear of hurting her, Irene needed to account for no such danger; it was Mystique, in fact, who went now with slow caution, for Irene was slightly built and fragile, soft as silk where Azazel had been like stone, and Mystique did not always remember her own strength.

Five years ago or a thousand, shortly after the founding of the Brotherhood, Mystique had dislocated a man's shoulder and broken his arm with simply a twist of her wrist, and back then she had not been in nearly as good shape as she was now. That had been the first time that she ever hurt someone like that intentionally, and afterward guilt and nightmares had plagued her for years. Well, Mystique was long past worrying over what she did to such scum, but Irene was a fellow Mutant and Mystique had no desire to do her harm.

But it was Irene who hurt her, though she didn't mean to. "I could never write about this," she told Mystique in an uneven voice, her breath coming ragged. "It's too real," she said, spine arching as she laid on the bed, her toes curled and the tendons in her neck taunt. "If I put something this real into a poem it would never sell," and Mystique remembered then how Azazel had also, in his broken English, compared her to poetry during their first time. How certain she had been that_ they_ were the real thing – how certain they had both been that they were the only real thing in the world – and that it would never end.

But Azazel was gone, and whether or not that had been, in the final estimation, her own fault was immaterial to the reality that he was in fact gone. So Mystique put him out of her mind – she had developed by then a remarkable talent for pretending not to want all the things she couldn't have – and for a time there was only herself and Irene, and the rest of the ugly and vicious world had stepped back, if only for the briefest time, in deference to what joys they could draw from one another's bodies.

And before very long Irene's predictions proved to have been correct, as they always did.

Mystique made her climax twice, and that was good – that was as much a release for herself as it was for Irene – she was sure that they could keep going for quite some time longer.

But then Irene had become strangely and unexpectedly... distant. It was as though something else was distracting her, pulling her attention away from her own body and from Mystique and what Mystique's hands were doing.

"Do you want to try something else for a while?" Mystique asked her, trying not to sound annoyed or insulted. Trying not to feel hurt. She laid down on her side next to Irene, one hand resting on the curve of her stomach, and whispered into her ear, "I can be a man for you, if you want."

She Irene tense up under her hand. There was a long silence, during which Mystique wished very much that she could see Irene's face. _I've said something that she finds revolting, _she thought, and tried to fix it. "I mean, I can be absolutely anything, you know. I can be whatever it is you want me to be."

"No, you can't," Irene said, and there was sadness – _and anger? _– in her voice. "You can only be what you are, and what you're going to be. You can't be anything else. No one can."

Mystique got out of the bed then. When she turned the lights on Irene drew the covers up over herself, and Mystique bit back a comment that she wouldn't really have meant only with great effort. There was, she saw, a new pallor to Irene's skin. Her hands were shaking.

"You're having visions," Mystique said. "About me."

"No," Irene said, but she was a terrible liar; she did not know how to guard her own face from showing the truth. "I'm just tired. Please. I just want to go to sleep."

Mystique was no longer entirely certain that she was welcomed in that bed, but she'd turned the lights off and crawled into it behind Irene anyway. She was not sure if Irene slept, but she did, at least for a time.

It was the crying that woke Mystique, near dawn, as the sun was just beginning to leak in through the window blinds – a shuddering and convulsive sobbing muffled against the side of a pillow, and there was a moment, when she was still struggling to reorientate herself from her dreams to the real world, when she was certain that it was Kurt, that they were still back at the old Brotherhood Headquarters and Kurt was still alive (for she was quite certain that he was dead, and it would be another two decades yet until she learned otherwise), and he'd had one of his bad dreams and had brought himself into her room.

But the instant of false hope died even in the moment of its birth, and she realized that it was only Irene, crying into her pillow.

Mystique tried to find out what was wrong, but maybe she was not as kind about this as she should have been. The truth was, she had cried almost all of her own tears away already, and now she found herself short of patience with those who still had some left.

Also, the sobbing frightened her, because she was certain that it was all to do with herself. What could possible be in her future that could make Irene cry like that for her, given everything that was in her past? She had very little left to lose now, after all, and in only a few hours she would be leaving one of the last pieces – her adopted daughter – behind.

Mystique did not consider that the tears might have been for Anna Marie rather than herself until much, much later, and by then she was in no position to allow herself to care.

"What's wrong?" she asked Irene, but Irene didn't respond. Mystique tried variations on that question five or six times, and got no other answer than a shaking of her head, which was still pressed against the pillow. When she tried to touch Irene, the other woman jerked away violently.

"Just tell me what you've seen," she demanded at last, exasperated and more than a little angry. "Tell me what it is – whatever the hell it is – and I'll avoid it! Tell me where I fuck up and I won't."

"It doesn't make any difference," Irene said, sitting up in the bed. She swiped at her face with the sides of her hands viciously, wiping the tears out of her unseeing eyes. "Even if I told you now, you'd do everything exactly the same in the end."

_She's a mess,_ Mystique thought. _She's an emotional basket case – I can't leave Marie here, she's not equipped to take care of a child. _But she knew as clearly as if Irene had told her herself that she would leave the girl here, because no matter how much Irene's ability fucked with her head sometimes, she was still a whole hell of a lot more suited to loving and protecting Anna Marie than she was.

Irene stood and walked over to her dresser, opened one of the drawers. She was doing something there, fiddling with some object, but Mystique couldn't see exactly what.

"That's bullshit," Mystique said. "If you tell me I can just..." but she didn't finish the thought. Irene had turned around, and there was a gun in her hand. She pointed it at Mystique's chest.

"You won't shoot me," Mystique said.

"You don't know that," Irene said.

Mystique did not at first feel especially impressed by the gun; Irene was no killer – Mystique was quite sure of that much – and after all, she was still blind.

In one smooth movement, Mystique slid from the bed and onto her feet. She moved to the left, her bare feet absolutely soundless on the carpet. The barrel of the gun moved with her, remaining trained over her heart.

In the guest room down the hall, Anna Marie began to wail. Irene did not react to the sound.

"The baby's crying," Mystique told her. "Someone needs to go check on her."

A black and murderous rage came onto Irene's face at the mention of Anna Marie. Mystique watched her, utterly flabbergasted. _What did I do? _she wanted to ask, but her voice had gone missing.

"You bitch," Irene said, and her finger twitched on the gun's trigger. _She is really going to shoot me,_ Mystique thought, with a sort of bewildered wonder. _Huh_. She found herself unable to react to this revelation. "You miserable fucking heartless bitch."

"You don't want to kill me," Mystique said, looking down the black eye of the handgun's barrel. "I'm not that bad," and the note of pleading that she heard in her own voice had nothing whatsoever to do with how badly she really didn't want that gun to be pointed at her anymore. "I'm never so bad that you really want to do that to me."

"You are," Irene said. "You don't have any idea."

It had become very difficult to discount Irene's visions; she had, after all, been right about everything else. "Well," Mystique said, "then I guess you should just go ahead and pull that trigger."

"I already told you," Irene said. "I can't. It doesn't matter how much I want to. I can't.

"Get out of my house," she said. "Don't ever come back."

The baby was crying more loudly now. Anna Marie had never appreciated being ignored. "I need to say good-bye first."

"No," Irene told her, her voice shaking. "You won't. You'll leave now. I'll make you."

"I don't really think you can do that," Mystique said carefully. "You've already told me that you won't use that gun."

"This is how I'll make you leave," Irene said. "I am going to say that if you don't get the fuck out of here immediately, I will tell you _exactly_ what you are in the process of becoming. I won't actually have to do this, because you don't want to know – or maybe you do know already and simply can't stand to hear it. I neither know nor care, and in any case, the results will be exactly the same: You will leave and you will leave now."

Irene's predictions always came true. Mystique left.

AUTHOR'S NOTES -

1.) This story is part of the same universe as DEVIL. At some point in the future it will probably be reworked to become a chapter of DEVIL.

2.) A note on the timeline; my goal with DEVIL continues to be to explain how the characters in FC got to where they are in the first two X-Men films. However, the timeline in FC doesn't actually fit very well with these films - we see a young Scott and Storm, for instance, but if this was the same universe they would have been at least in their late forties before the first X movie started. This obviously isn't the case.

Therefore, I have decided (and thank my GF for the idea) that the first two X-Men films take place at some point in the 1980s. Problem solved.

3.) I arbitrarily decided that Irene is a poet. Because of reasons.

4.) I also gave her a gun instead of a crossbow. Because crossbows are sort of silly.


End file.
